Leopard and my cat got in a fight!

I have been an ardent supporter of the Apple operating system for a few years now. I am by no means some sort of OS X guru, nor am I a crazed Mac zealot. I am a died in the wool technophile, a gadget geek, a tech junkie. I would consider myself beyond the realm of the average user. I have built more than two dozen custom computers, created a variety of network solutions for more than a dozen customers, I have built more than 20 websites to date etc.. ad nauseam. The picture I am trying to paint here is that of someone who is technically competent and skilled. But Monday I ran into something that for me was a brick wall.

I was upgrading my Mac from Tiger (10.4.?) to Leopard (10.5) when I ran into a problem. At some point early in the upgrade my cat (ironic isn’t it?) decided to sit down on my keyboard. What happened at that point isn’t clear, but I am pretty sure he managed a few well placed keystrokes that cancelled the upgrade mid way through. I walked back into the living room in time to see my Mac rebooting. My initial thought was,”WOW! That was fast!” But at boot up I got a kernel panic. Not good. So I did what all Mac user do, I tried all the known keyboard shortcuts to get it to boot up (this involves various keys being held down during boot up). No luck! I trolled the forums, Googled till my fingers bled, and then finally had someone on a forum tell me that the “new” Apple keyboards (like the one I have) don’t register with the computer fast enough to allow the keyboard shortcuts to work at boot. Weird, you would think that Apple…the king of “it just makes sense” would have noticed such a big mistake in design! Luckily the same person who tipped me off about the keyboard issue also told me that I can use my Apple remote at boot up to perform the same function as the keyboard would have. Now THAT is the Apple I know….It is brilliant! So long story short, my Leopard upgrade was a PITA. I ended up doing a clean re-install of Tiger, then did the upgrade to Leopard.

So far I would say Leopard was worth the headache. It seems to run even FASTER than Tiger did! OS X is a beautiful OS…even if it is not the most user friendly upgrade when something goes wrong.

This is for all you *nix people out there….why no bios on OS X? Is it a *nix thing? Or an Apple thing?